Warning Signs of the Times

These are from the Happy Mutant Handbook by Riverhead books. I've posted these warnings on our various labs over the years. I needed to refresh some and went through the trouble of scanning them to print at home so I thought I would share. Enjoy!

Refinement

Everything seems to benefit from a bit of refining. People, protocols, techniques, strategies, kitchens, all improve from a tweeking aimed at being a little better and more efficient. One of the joys of my marriage is always working to make it better. We've always worked well together, and worked together well. As life changes we even find the need to reshuffled the furniture into new optimal locations occasionally. Everything can always be rethought. But sometimes you have to stand back and say, yup that's it, that's good.

I'm done tuning the slingshot. It is freaking perfect. If you are in the neighborhood, come give it a pull. It will make you smile too, and it's a good whole body workout. Way better than going to a gym.

Hugh Jass

Caught a bit of whimsy Saturday night after a long hard days work in the garden and built this Hugh Jass slingshot. It is made all out of Yew wood that was stripped of it's bark in an Idaho forest to make the anti-cancer drug, Taxol. When the 5K year old Ice Man mummy thawed out of the glacier on the border between Austria and Italy in the early 1990s he had with him a Copper ax with a Yew wood handle and an unfinished Yew wood bow. It was the right wood for this task too. She hucks a wormy apple a lot farther than I can!

FYI I just happen to know Hugh Jass' Safeway Club Card info if you ever shop at Safeway and want to chuckle. His phone number is 509.397.1234 (he lives at 666 Church street in Colfaxberg). Use the phone number and you'll get a receipt that says Hugh Jass and you might get the pleasure of having someone say, "Have a nice day Mr./Mrs. Jass"

Once a checker commented on the phone number saying, "That is an easy one to remember." To which I replied, "You don't think I'm going to give you my real phone number just for the sale price do ya?" When the number worked the checker said, "well it must be somebodies phone number Mr. Jass." Guess I should have said, "I'm not giving you my real name just for the sale price, either."

Kristi used it at a Safeway in Lewiston once and got a shocked look from the night manager, who whipped out his own Safeway Club Card receipt and you know whose name was on it? Hugh Jass! Nice to know there are other happy mutants out here. Ain't life grand?

Justin Case

Just in case you thought we were overplaying the "plague card" when discussing the number of hoppers on the Box 4 Ranch this year,,, I offer more photographic evidence.

graffiti

Yes, I encourage children to help me take pictures of weird things,, and while we were in Europe I took quite a few pictures of the graffiti which was pretty much everywhere in the old east. "Kill Maim Burn" is at a monument where we would do some urban rock climbing. It was on the hilltop in the neighborhood park right across the street, and what is written in the stone translates roughly to "the war dead implore peace"; so it has a different tone than, "kill maim burn". There were also some pretty talented stencil artists around town.



This was one of Kristi's favorites in Jena. better run nazi scum. It took me a while to see the anime eyes



No, Ben did not carve his name in a spanish cactus, but he did get a charge out of seeing his name. I think this counts as graffiti.

Czech for "We passed in a dream"

I still haven't done the research on this place, but there are a couple recent times in east German history when Ha Ha game over is appropriate and unser freude eure toter means:

Our joy your dead

Loved these guys

These two go good together

This was real vandalism, broken glass and all, that showed up one day on our bank.

Things I've lost at home

Remember that 19 hour 100Km German walk I took a while back? Truth be told I spent most of the following week in bed, it took three weeks for the painful inflammation on the backside of my patellas to wane, and I'm still having some fallout from that long hike, or better said,, fall-off. On the bright side I still have 4 toe nails, which is close to a half-full set, but I'm not 100% sure I get to keep the one on that left pinky toe. 3/10 isn't at all close to half-full, and is instead a lot closer to just weird looking feet.

Things I've found at home

Like the old world, the new world has it's own charm.
Europe didn't have any equivalents of these for me:

My own private Snake River (where you can catch more bass than you can count)


The Oregon coast (where you can drive on the beach for miles with truckloads of cousins)


Humming birds (and I should add a recent super close encounter with a Peregrine Falcon)



A garden full of grasshoppers (Also known as targets. I need to go buy a few thousand more BBs and continue to do my part to protect the local new world plant life!)